I decided to try my hand at making a home firewall/gateway. SmoothWall seemed to be the distro of choice. I had two computers that were likely candidates for the job an IBM Aptiva P166 and a Packard Bell P90. Both still very serviceable. I also have a small collection of Linux-proven NIC's that I thought would work just fine in this application.
After several attempts on these two boxes, I ended up picking up a Dell Pentium 233. This computer also seems to not want to take to installing SmoothWall. I have checked the SmoothWall site for hardware compatibility and the NIC's for the most part appear to be supported. Here's a list of what I have and the Linux driver module typically used: PCI RealTek 8139 10/100 - rtl8139 RealTek 8129 10 BaseT - ne2k-pc / ne2k / ne SMC EtherPower - tulip ISA Intel EtherExpress 16 - eexpress 3Com ?? - ?? All three computers will get to the Green NIC probe phase and fail. The probe will not autodetect the cards. I have gone into manual mode and given it the appropriate module, IO and IRQ. All to no avail. These cards have all worked under Windows not very long ago and some have even run perfectly fine under other distributions of Linux. I am very careful with my hardware so I cannot believe that they could all be bad. The ISO I used for burning my SmoothWall disc was checked against the MD5 Checksum and it was verified. I cannot believe that three computers would all refuse to take this install with various NIC's in place. I enlisted Marcel's help and he could not overcome my install issues either. We're both stymied. Anyone have any experience they'd like to share or any advice? Thanks in advance. As an aside, we even attempted to throw OpenBSD on one of the boxes and it crapped out almost immediately. We were pretty tired at this point so we did not delve too deeply into this install. It was a floppy/FTP install. Jarrod Major CLUG Treasurer Registered Linux User: #224211
